Even during my time with Camille, it wasn’t easy to find hotels that accepted smokers, but for the reasons I’ve already stated, it only took us one day to cross Spain and another to reach Paris, and we had discovered some dissident establishments: one on the Basque coast; the other on the Côte Vermeille; a third also in the Pyrénées-Orientales but further inland, in Bagnères-de-Luchon to be precise – already in the mountains, it’s probably the last of those – the Château de Riell, which left me with the most magical memory of the improbable kitschy, pseudo-exotic decoration in all the rooms.
Legal oppression was less perfect in those days – there were still a few holes in the mesh of the net – but also I was younger and hoped I could stay within the limits of the law; still believing in the justice of my country, I trusted in the generally beneficial character of its laws and hadn’t yet acquired the skill of the guerrilla fighter that would later let me treat smoke detectors with indifference: once you’d unscrewed the cover of the device, you only needed two good clips with the wire cutter to deactivate the power circuit of the alarm and that was that. It’s harder to get around housekeepers, whose sense of smell – over-trained in detecting the scent of tobacco – is usually flawless. The only solution in that situation is to keep them sweet: a generous tip always helps to buy their silence, but obviously it makes your stay more expensive, and you’re never quite safe from betrayal.
* * *
I had planned our first stop in the parador at Chinchón, an uncontroversial choice. Paradores in general are an uncontroversial choice, but this particular one was charming, based in a sixteenth-century convent. The walls opened on to a tiled patio with a flowing fountain and there were magnificent dark wooden Spanish armchairs that you could sit on in all the corridors and even at reception. So she did, crossing her legs with her usual blasé hauteur and, without paying the slightest attention to the decor she immediately turned on her mobile, preparing to complain that there was no network. There was network, in fact, which was quite good news as it would keep her busy throughout the evening. She still had to get up again, not without some signs of irritation, to present her own passport, as well as her French residence permit, and to sign in the places marked on the different forms presented to her by the hotelier, three in all. The administration of the paradores still had a strangely bureaucratic and pernickety side, absolutely inappropriate to what the reception of a hôtel de charme should be like in the imagination of the Western tourist. Welcome cocktails were not their style but photocopies of passports were; things probably hadn’t changed since Franco. Perhaps paradores were in fact hôtels de charme: they were their almost perfect archetype, every medieval fortress or Renaissance monastery still standing in Spain had been converted into a parador. This visionary policy, first put in place in 1928, had assumed its full scale a little later on, with the arrival of one man. Francisco Franco, regardless of other – sometimes questionable – aspects of his political activities, could be considered the genuine inventor, on a global scale, of gracious tourism. But his work didn’t stop there: this same universal spirit would later lay the foundations of an authentic mass tourism (think of Benidorm! think of Torremolinos! was there anything like it in the world in the 1960s?). Francisco Franco was in fact a real giant of tourism, and it was by that standard that he would ultimately be re-evaluated; several Swiss hotel training schools had already begun to re-evaluate him and, in more general economic terms, Francoism had recently been the subject of interesting studies in Harvard and Yale, showing how the caudillo – sensing that Spain would never catch up with the train of the industrial revolution (which, let’s face it, it had completely missed) – had boldly decided to burn its bridges and invest in the third and final phase of the European economy, the tertiary sector: tourism and services, giving its country a crucial advantage at a time when salaried workers in newly industrialised countries, having achieved greater purchasing power, wanted to spend their money in Europe on gracious or mass tourism, in accordance with their status. Having said that, for now there was not a single Chinese person at the parador in Chinchón. An extremely ordinary English academic couple waited their turn behind us, but the Chinese would come, they were bound to come, I had no doubt that they were on their way. But the welcome formalities needed simplifying, however much respect we can or must feel for the caudillo ’s contribution to tourism things had changed; it was unlikely now that spies from colder climates would slip among the innocent cohort of ordinary tourists, as the spies from the cold countries had themselves become ordinary tourists, like their boss Vladimir Putin, the first of them.
* * *
Once the formalities were out of the way and all the hotel forms filled in and signed, I experienced one more moment of masochistic jubilation when I caught the ironic, if not contemptuous, look that Yuzu darted at me as I held out my Amigos de Paradores card to the receptionist to collect my points: she’d be saving that one up. I headed towards our room, pulling my Samsonite behind me; she followed me, head boldly raised, having left her two Zadig & Voltaire (or maybe Pascal & Blaise, I don’t remember) bags right in the middle of the reception hall. I pretended not to notice, and as soon as we got to our room I poured myself a Cruzcampo from the minibar while lighting a cigarette – I had nothing to fear, past experiences had convinced me that the smoke detectors in the paradores also dated from the Franco era, from the end of the Franco era actually, and nobody cared. Regardless of whether it was a late and superficial concession to the norms of international tourism – based on the illusion of an American clientele who would never come to Europe anyway, let alone visit the paradores – only Venice could still boast a vague presence of American tourists in Europe. It was now time for the European tourist industry to turn towards rougher and newer countries for whom lung cancer represented only a marginal and relatively undocumented inconvenience. For about ten minutes nothing happened, or hardly anything; Yuzu walked around a little, checked that her mobile was still picking up a signal and that there was no drink in the minibar appropriate to her status – there were beers, ordinary Coke (not even Diet Coke) and mineral water. Then, in a tone that didn’t even sound like a question: ‘Aren’t they bringing the luggage?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I replied before opening a second Cruzcampo. The Japanese can’t really blush, the psychological mechanism exists but the result tends towards a shade of ochre, and I must acknowledge that at last she swallowed her outrage – it took a moment of quivering but she did swallow her outrage – then she turned around without a word and made for the door. She came back a few minutes later, dragging her suitcase, while I was finishing my beer. When she came back again five minutes later with her travelling bag, I had started on a third drink – the journey had made me really thirsty. As I expected she didn’t address a word to me all evening, which allowed me to concentrate on the food – since the very beginning, part of the package at paradores has included an emphasis on regional Spanish gastronomy, and in my eyes the result is often delicious, albeit usually a bit greasy.
* * *
For our second stop, I had upped the ante further still by choosing a Relais & Châteaux, the Château de Brindos, in the commune of Anglet, not far from Biarritz. This time there was indeed a welcome cocktail, numerous hurried waiters, canelés and macarons lay ready for us in porcelain bowls, and a cold bottle of Ruinart awaited us in the minibar. It was a really terrific Relais & Châteaux on that terrific Basque coast, and everything could have gone brilliantly if I hadn’t suddenly remembered – just as I was passing through the reading room where deep wing chairs surrounded tables covered with piles of Figaro Magazine, Côte Basque, Vanity Fair and various other publications – that I had come to this hotel before, with Camille, before we split up, at the end of our final summer together. The minimal and very temporary revival of goodwill that I might have felt for Yuzu (who, in this more favourable environment, had perked up again, who had to some extent started to purr again, and who had already begun to spread outfit choices
out on the bed, with the obvious intention of being dazzling at dinner) had immediately been cancelled out by the comparison I was inevitably led to make between their reactions. Camille had strolled through the reception rooms open-mouthed, studying the framed paintings, the bare stone walls, the elaborate chandeliers. Stepping into the bedroom she had stopped, impressed, by the immaculate mass of the king-size bed before sitting down shyly on its edge to test out how springy and soft it was. Our junior suite had a view of the lake; she had immediately wanted to take a photograph of the two of us, and when, opening the door of the minibar, I had asked her if she wanted a glass of champagne she had exclaimed: ‘Oh yeahhh…!’ with an expression of total joy, and I knew she was savouring every second of that joy accessible only to the upper-middle classes. It was different for me because I had had access to this category of hotel in the past; these were the hotels where my father stopped off when we were going on holiday to Méribel, at the Château d’Igé in Saône-et-Loire, or the Domaine de Clairefontaine in Chonas-l’Amballan – I myself belonged to the upper-middle classes while Camille was a child of the middle-middle classes, who to tell the truth had been rather impoverished by the financial crisis.
I no longer even wanted to go for a walk on the shore of the lake while waiting for dinner-time; the very idea was odious to me, like a violation, and I only reluctantly put on a waistcoat (after finishing the bottle of champagne, however) to go to the hotel restaurant, one star in the Michelin Guide, where John Argand creatively revisited the Basque terroir through his menu ‘Le marché de John ’. These restaurants might have been bearable if the waiters hadn’t recently acquired the habit of announcing the composition of every last amuse-bouche, their tone inflated with an emphasis that was half-gastronomical and half-literary, studying the customer for signs of complicity or at least of interest – with a view to making the meal a shared convivial experience, I imagine, while their way of bellowing: ‘Enjoy!’ at the end of their culinary sermon was generally enough to take away my appetite.
Another even more regrettable innovation since my visit with Camille was the installation of smoke detectors in the rooms. I had spotted them as soon as I entered, but at the same time had noted that, given their height on the ceiling – three metres at least, more probably four – it would be impossible for me to put them out of action. After hesitating for an hour or two, I discovered additional blankets in a cupboard and settled down to sleep on the balcony – luckily it was a mild night; I had experienced much worse during a conference on the pig-farming industry in Stockholm. I used one of the porcelain bowls holding the pastries as an ashtray; I would just have to clean it in the morning, and throw the butts into one of the hydrangea pots.
* * *
The third day of driving was interminable; the A10 motorway seemed almost entirely given over to roadworks, and there were two hours of traffic jams at the Bordeaux exit. I was in an advanced state of exasperation when I reached Niort, one of the ugliest towns I have ever had the misfortune to see. Yuzu couldn’t conceal an expression of alarm when she realised that our stop for the day was leading us to the Hôtel Mercure-Marais Poitevin. Why inflict such humiliation on her? Humiliation that was also in vain because, as the receptionist told me with a visible hint of malicious satisfaction, the hotel had very recently, ‘at the request of the clientele’, become 100 per cent non-smoking – yes, it was true, the website hadn’t yet been changed, she was aware of that.
* * *
In the middle of the afternoon the following day, and for the first time in my life with relief, I saw the foothills of Paris. Every Sunday as a young man I left Senlis, where I had had a very protected childhood, to come back and continue my studies in the centre of Paris; I passed through Villiers-le-Bel, then Sarcelles, then Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, then Saint-Denis; I saw the population density and the rows of buildings rising around me, and the violence of conversations increasing on the bus, and the level of danger growing visibly; each time I had the clearly characterised sensation of coming back to hell, and a hell built by human beings at their convenience. Now it was different; a social trajectory without any great verve, but which none the less had allowed me to escape – I hoped once and for all – the physical and even visual contact of the dangerous classes; I was now in my own hell, which I had built to my own taste.
We lived in a big three-bedroom flat on the twenty-ninth floor of the Totem Tower, a kind of honeycombed structure of concrete and glass resting on four enormous raw concrete pillars, which looked like those mushrooms that have a repugnant appearance but are apparently delicious – I think they are called morels. The Totem Tower was located in the heart of the district of Beaugrenelle, just opposite Swan Island. I hated that tower and hated the district of Beaugrenelle, but Yuzu loved that gigantic concrete morel; she had ‘immediately fallen in love with it’, that was what she announced to all our guests, at least at first. Perhaps she still did announce it, but I’d given up meeting Yuzu’s guests a long time ago – I shut myself away in my room just before they arrived and wouldn’t come out for the rest of the evening.
We had had separate rooms for several months; I had left the ‘master suite’ (like a bedroom, but with a dressing room and a bathroom, I mention this for the benefit of my working-class readers) to occupy the ‘friends’ room’, and I used the adjacent shower room. A shower room was all I needed: a brush of the teeth, a quick shower and that was me done.
Our relationship was in its terminal phase – nothing could save it, and besides that wouldn’t even have been desirable; however I have to agree that we had what people call a ‘superb view’. Both the sitting room and the master suite overlooked the Seine, and beyond the sixteenth arrondissement to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parc de Saint-Cloud and so on; on fine days you could make out the Palace of Versailles. From my bedroom, you had a direct view of the Novotel, only a stone’s throw away, and beyond that most of Paris; but that view didn’t interest me, I always left the double curtains closed, I didn’t just hate the district of Beaugrenelle, I hated Paris; that city infested with eco-friendly bourgeois repelled me. Perhaps I was a bourgeois too but I wasn’t eco-friendly; I drove a diesel 4x4 – I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet – and I systematically sabotaged the selective recycling system put in place by the residents’ association by chucking empty wine bottles in the bin meant for paper and packaging, and perishable rubbish in the glass collection bin. I was rather proud of my lack of civic spirit, but I was also taking revenge on the indecent price of rent and service charges – once I had paid rent and the service charges, given Yuzu the monthly allowance she had asked me for to ‘cover household expenses’ (essentially, ordering sushi), I had spent exactly 90 per cent of my monthly salary; in short, my adult life consisted of slowly gnawing away at my inheritance, and my father didn’t deserve that; it was definitely time for me to put a stop to this nonsense.
* * *
Since I’d known her, Yuzu had worked at the Japanese House of Culture on Quai Branly, which was only five hundred metres from the apartment and yet she still cycled there on her stupid Dutch bike that she had to bring up in the lift afterwards and then park in the living room. I suppose her parents must have pulled strings to get her that sinecure. I didn’t know exactly what her parents did, but they were undeniably rich (with the only children of wealthy parents, you get people like Yuzu, whatever the country, whatever the culture), probably not extremely rich – I couldn’t imagine her father as chairman of Sony or Toyota, more like a civil servant, a high-ranking civil servant.
She explained to me that she had been employed to ‘rejuvenate and modernise’ the programme of cultural events. They weren’t high-end events: the flyer that I picked up the first time I visited her at her office gave off a sense of deadly boredom: workshops in origami, ikebana and tenkoku; lectures on playing Go and tea ceremonies (the Urasenke school and the Omotosenke school). The few Japanese guests they had wer
e living national treasures, but most of them were at least ninety years old – they could appropriately have been called dying national treasures. In short, to fulfil her contract she only had to organise one or two manga exhibitions, or a couple of festivals on new trends in Japanese porn; it was quite an easy job.
* * *
I had given up going to exhibitions organised by Yuzu six months previously, after the one devoted to Daikichi Amano. He was a photographer and video artist who showed images of naked girls covered with different repugnant animals like eels, octopuses, cockroaches, earthworms … In one video a Japanese girl caught the tentacles of an octopus coming out of a toilet bowl with her teeth. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so disgusting. As usual, unfortunately, I had started on the buffet before taking an interest in the works on display; two minutes later, I hurried to the toilets at the cultural centre to throw up my rice and raw fish.
* * *
The weekends were always torture, but otherwise I could almost go for weeks without meeting Yuzu. When I set off for the Ministry of Agriculture, she was still fast asleep – she rarely got up before midday. And when I got back in the evening at about seven o’clock she was hardly ever there. It probably wasn’t her work that made her keep such long hours – this was perfectly normal after all, she was only twenty-six, I was twenty years older and the desire for a social life fades with maturity, you end up telling yourself you’re over it. I had also installed an SFR box in my room so I could access the sports channels and follow the French, English, German, Spanish and Italian national championships, which represented a considerable number of hours of entertainment – if Pascal had been aware of the SFR box he might have sung a different tune – and all that for the same price as other operators; I couldn’t understand why SFR didn’t put more emphasis on its marvellous sports package in their advertising, but each to his own.
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